Increasingly, industry is turning to automated methods of tracking assets, including personnel. Depending on the usage, such asset tracking provides for improved efficiencies and asset management, safety, productivity, or compliance with business policies. In addition, such asset tracking can reduce theft or unauthorized access. However, repetitively and accurately sensing, monitoring, recording, tracking, alerting, predicting, and reporting the activities of the assets is difficult.
Manual methods of validating the presence or absence of an asset and ingress or egress, even when enhanced by the addition of video surveillance, are costly and error-prone due to human factors. For example, manual observation of hospital employees following a hand hygiene regimen can be expensive and miss a large portion of the employees complete hygiene behavior. In another example, tracking patients in an emergency room using traditional methods is error-prone.
Passive radiofrequency identification (RFID) has a limited range. High electromagnetic field strengths can interfere with hospital equipment, and running wires for both power and data to a passive RFID reader is considered disadvantageous. Further, passive asset tags provide no information while outside a small perimeter in proximity to the passive RFID reader.
Infrared solutions of hybrid infrared (IR) solutions utilize line of sight and typically utilize directional alignment with the IR emitter. When IR intensity is used as a metric for proximity decisions, secondary reflections make it difficult to determine scalar information to discern among multiple assets in close proximity, all communicating simultaneously.
Wi-Fi solutions utilize data drops and power to the Wi-Fi readers. Wi-Fi asset tags have a relatively short battery life and utilize a large device, making deployment impractical. Wi-Fi locators also lack the positional accuracy and resolution for associating an asset with an event, such as washing hands or attending a bed.
As such, an improved asset or personnel tracking system would be desirable.